Anim(e)-tion Station

In 1963, Astro Boy - under it's original Japanese title of Tetsuwan Atomu - hit television screens all across Japan and embodied the elements that would come to be known as "Anime." It enjoyed mild success in America, but anime would really come into it's own in the states thanks more to shows such as Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, Sailor Moon, and especially Dragon Ball Z.

Whatever qualities these shows may have had, and I'm sure they are (not) many, they all contained one vast problem: They were cheap productions.

This isn't really surprising. A look through much of the anime that has come out over the decades shows a vast number of animes that wouldn't constitute much more than "B" productions. Though occasionally one of these shows might have a relatively good story, they all consisted of the problems hardly reticent throughout all of anime.

The main problem of low-budget animation projects is the art. In order to save effort, anime studios created - or borrowed - simple cheats to bypass the budget problem. This included things like drawing the nose as a single line connected to the chin, so the mouth could flap about on the side of the face without anything else on the body needing to be animated. Or drawing characters in specific poses so that a single cell of them could be dragged across the screen to give the appearance of action. Or giving characters incredibly ridiculous, very over-the-top facial expressions.

The last of these leads us into another inherent problem with these productions. The studios did not feel that they could convincingly pull off subtlety on a tight budget. The over-the-top facial expressions helped solve part of this dilemma. Anime explanations came about intended to solve the rest.

Anime is notorious for these explanations. If you've watched anime in your life time, you know what I'm talking about. Watch any episode of Dragon Ball Z - or any number of its spiritual successors such as Inuyasha, Naruto, or Bleach - and more likely than not a character will do something, and then everything will stop for the next 5-10 minutes so that a character can explain in excruciating detail exactly what it is that's occurring.

For some reason, this dull writing cheat is adored by anime fans. But to those who aren't, particularly to people who are fully grown adults, these explanations just make even the most serious moments of a show seem downright silly and child-oriented.

This is an important factor when it comes to story telling: Don't. Baby. Your audience.

This is a problem through a great many different genre of narratives. It's constant in anime, it's prevalent throughout comic books, and it's the most cherished cheat of fantasy novelists. But it's quite simply silly and incredibly pointless. You don't need to explain absolutely every little detail to your audience. You can assume that they might be smart enough to figure things out for themselves. A truly great story - and this is particularly important in visual arts such as comics, movies, and animations - is one that shows you something and doesn't tell you it's there.

In the movie Citizen Kane, they didn't just constantly tell you that Kane was the richest man alive. They could show you that by depicting an incredibly lavish house containing fireplaces 6 feet tall and 12 feet wide. You get the idea just by seeing the results of his wealth.

Anime has an annoying love for convention, so it's rare to see something that regularly occurs throughout anime suddenly stop being used. To my surprise, a great majority of animes have stopped using the mouth flap cheat, and many of the expressions will now be less over-the-top, but these anime explanations just don't seem to be going away.

There are anime shows and movies out there that actually have good stories, but often they're bogged down under persistant anime conventions and a complete lack of desire to be truly creative, inventive, or artistic. This creates an interesting dilemma between being able to enjoy a good story and a good story being ruined by lazy animation. Often times even when I want to enjoy an anime, it's difficult to find something good under the layers of crap that are these conventions.

Story telling is an art. It's always important to remember that. And if you're not willing to dedicate yourself to telling a good story, no amount of art, or action explanations, or hackneyed conventions are going to save the final product. So many potentially good animes over the past 45 years have fallen by the wayside because the creative team behind them have chosen convention over story.

Maybe, Japan, it's time for a change.